How I got my PR merged into Apache Flink

Hi 👋

This is a short story on how I got my pull request merged into Apache Flink.

It started with the need to set CPU and Memory limits to Flink jobs running under Kubernetes.

The first thing I did was to join the user mailing list and ask around if someone has encountered the issue and if there’s a solution to it. The people from the mailing list were very friendly and they pointed me to an existing ticket on the Flink jira board, which was exactly what I needed.

To speed things up, I decided to implement the ticket by myself. I wrote on the mailing list that I want to implement FLINK-15648 and started signing the Apache individual contributor license agreement.

After sending the signed document via email, I cloned the Flink project from GitHub and imported it into my IntelliJ IDE. Flink has some great documentation on how to setup your IDE and import the project.

Lastly, I’ve implemented the feature and submitted the PR flink/pull/17098. The first time I forgot to generate the code docs and I’ve got a CI error. After the error was fixed, the PR was merged. It did not speed things up as I initially thought since it was merged into Flink 1.15. Nonetheless, It was a smooth and fun process and the code review that I’ve received was also well done.

I hope your experience contributing to open-source software will be as fun as mine was.

Thanks for reading and happy hacking!